I recently discovered a KT Tunstall song from 2010 called “(Still a) Weirdo” and I was like “oh, she wrote a song about me!”
Saying that you’re a weirdo usually gets a similar reaction to saying that you’re fat—people reflexively deny it, even when with the least bit of consideration you have to acknowledge that it’s fact. There's nothing wrong with it; we’ve just internalized that those are bad things to be. Like, okay, it’s not great that I am…inconsistent at making small talk, but that’s not what makes me weird. Or not the only thing, anyway. It’s the shelf of books about the science of dead bodies, the recreational study of the Washington Geological Survey maps of tsunami inundation areas (the Juan de Fuca plate was always my favorite, even before anyone was talking about the possibility of a devastating earthquake happening at like, any time). Or having a favorite tectonic plate. You know. Weird stuff.
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I was already thinking about this recently, because I read Emily Henry’s Funny Story (our featured book, as though anyone needs to talk up an EmHen joint) and a conversation between Daphne, the main character, and her coworker-turned-friend Ashleigh reminded me of something that happened to me (yes I posted about in my Instagram stories, sorry I'm recycling content!). Anyway, from the book, to set the scene:
“You didn’t have to come up,” I say. “You could’ve texted me from the car.”
“I drank a Pedialyte on the way over here, and my bladder’s bursting,” she says. “Plus I know basically nothing about you, so this was a good chance to find out if your house is full of surveillance equipment.”
I blink. “Surveillance equipment?”
“Landon and I have been taking bets on whether you’re in the FBI,” she provides helpfully.
I squint at her. “And you think I’m in the FBI because . . . ?”
“I don’t,” she says. “Landon does. My guess is witness protection.”
There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s being so reticent that your coworkers assume you’ve recently testified against a mob boss, and I never knew how thin the line between the two was.
I have mentioned my condo in Utah before, which is where this story takes place. It was a small complex: four buildings with four units each. Everyone was a corner unit, with two doors on the east side of the buildings and two on the west.
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Nobody really knew each other. The guy who was behind me (our kitchens shared a wall upstairs and the smaller bedroom and bathroom walls downstairs) had a lovely dog named Beau (probably Bo, although in my mind it was Beau) but I had no idea what the human’s name was. (Dan, apparently.) The only guy I knew by name was the HOA treasurer who we paid dues to. (He obviously embezzled tens of thousands from the HOA, who couldn’t see that coming.) So when I thought of my neighbor, he was “Beau’s owner.” There was Dirtbike Guy who was always washing it in the grass, a Single Mom…you just kind of knew of everyone without actually knowing them.
So I lived there alone for almost a full year before I got married and my husband moved in. I had people over a handful of times, and obviously he was there a lot while we were dating, but mostly just stayed home, read books, watched Netflix DVDs that came in the mail…it was a simpler time.
Well, once my husband moved in and somehow befriended the whole complex (extroverts, lol), it turned out that the neighbors whose door was right next to mine had a little nickname for me, too. They thought of me as The Spook, because they never saw me and joked (worried??) that I was a spy. My neighbor catty-corner from me said that before I got blinds for the big transom window above the entry, she would try to look in the window to see if she could see me and figure out what I was doing. (See, this is why you needed the picture. It was a split level, so you could ostensibly have two people standing at the top of the stairs in their respective units and look at each other through the transom.)
So yes, Daphne, the so-distant-maybe-she’s-in-WitSec character really spoke to me when I read Funny Story. And then of course we had like, similar parental trauma, big surprise. My dad forgot me at school too, girl! Like the time was in junior high, after the Saturday field trip downtown to the arena for an event associated with the NBA all star game, which was here that year (1995, probably?). I managed to make it through all 99 bottles on the wall and still he wasn’t there. Or the time I stayed for a club or audition or something and eventually had to walk down the main road to the house of a family whose kid my mom had taught years before and ask to use their phone. And those were just the times when he forgot to pick me up, there were plenty of other opportunities to neglect me, lol.
I deleted a kind downer paragraph about surviving childhood by disappearing, so I'm just going to end this abruptly by saying I'm finishing this post while waiting for Hamilton to start and don't have time for like, writing a conclusion. I thought I'd have more time (🎶 tiiiiiiiiiiime 🎶) to work on it but the house opened fully fifteen minutes late. The end.